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Centre for City Ecology
The Centre for City Ecology (CCE) works towards affecting the course of Toronto’s development by increasing urban literacy about how the city functions and how citizens and professionals can work together, and by enhancing their effectiveness in collaborating for that purpose.
The starting point for the CCE are ideas developed by Jane Jacobs, who wrote several books about the processes that create cities, their economies, and the ethics that underpin them. The constituency engaged by these ideas is a diverse one, including academics and activists, practitioners and professionals, politicians and community developers. It is drawn from many fields of interest including architecture, planning, economics, sociology, environmentalism, small business, social work, biology, public health, public policy and theology. Jacobs’ work is of relevance to our understanding of cities and the societies in which they function around the world: developed and developing, new and old, industrialized and agrarian.
In Jane Jacobs’ Foreword to the 1992 edition of her by-then classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (originally published in 1961), she described her main pursuit as the study of how a city’s physical, economic and ethical processes interact to form a fragile system that resembled a natural system’s ‘ecology’. To Jacobs’ eye everything was connected, nothing could be examined in isolation, and even the smallest detail in a city system (as in a natural one) could have much larger significance to the overall health and functioning of the city. “Processes are always of the essence,” she suggested. To that end, CCE focuses on three processes as components of the city ecology: its form, economics, and ethics. Learn more about the city ecology.
The goals of the CCE are to deliver programs that add knowledge, build capacity, and create connections that strengthen city ecology.
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